First week back at school after 5 years and I have a ton of homework. One of my professors starts writing problems on the board while teaching the class, I guess to ensure that we actually stay through the class. Bah. I understand all of the stuff but I am pretty lazy and all of the problems take pages of work each to complete.

I do not regret it, though. I am going to get my masters.

Portal Project

I also have a pretty cool portal project I am set to release in a week. My boss took a look at it and he loves it. The nice thing is that it is going to be tested by 50,000+ people before I release any of the code to the public. And, all of the users have to use it every day, so the feedback should help the project considerably. It is written in PHP, but there are helper utilities written in C. They are not required, but make the site run faster, index documents on the site faster, etc. All of the utilities have PHP counterparts also.

Other Work Stuff

Going to be writing some Oracle tools in C++. Good, because one of my professors insists that all of our projects are in C++ so it will be good practice. Oracle on HP-UX seems to be pretty well documented and I have tested some small apps. I am dying to have to write a bug gtk project on HP-UX for work, but all of the current utilities are either motif or run from the console.

I am still the Unix administrator which is kind of scary and I have a feeling that they are not in too much of a rush to bring in someone new. Really, Unix adminstration is not a hard job, but - as large of a company it is - they need a full-time guy and not a developer.

Man, I am worn. Back in school after many years so I am waking up really, really early and that is not cool. I am a late sleeper and I am used to waking up pretty much when I want and rolling into my job, doing my work, and going home.

Pah. But I promised myself I would get at least a masters before I died which is pretty fucking stupid when you think about it because what can a dead guy do with a masters? At least classes this semester are going to be easy if not boring. Wish me luck.

Also hacked a bit more on the gnome-vfs-ssh module. Asked this before, but is there an official way to grab a pseudo term in GNOME? I am just using getpt ()

I let people in my area connect to my wireless lan. I figure that letting people around me have internet access might be nice and people might appreciate it. I even named the wlan "opennet" just so people would know.

So, some fucker gets in and trys to start attacking my boxes. What the fuck? Bite the hand that feeds you? Probably some 12-year-old kiddie.

Well, I am hacking on the ssh-module.c that comes with gnome-vfs. ssh reads from tty so I have to create a pseudo-term. I asked on gnome-devel mailing list if there is a standard way of doing this and got no response so I am going to do it like kio-fish. fish is too cool and GNOME really could use something just like it. In a perfect world I would just be able to use the kde libs but this is not a perfect world.

I have one remaining server that has is running Windows NT and I just discovered the beauty of the cygwin tools. I had read how great they were, but had never used them. I ported 1 1/2 applications today to Unix. ssh'ing into an NT box and and being able to run vim and gcc right on the box is just too cool.
The Unix administrator left on Friday so I am the temporary Unix guy around here. He was a great guy, but a bit of a cowboy - all of his work was done as root so some of the boxes are really screwed up when it comes to file permissions. In order to do ANYTHING on some boxes you have to be root. Going to try to clean this up - and cross my fingers that the next Unix admin they hire has his/her shit together. If they hire the guy I chose things should be okay.
Anyways - going back to school. I figured that this is a good time to get a masters and even go all the way to doctorate. Would be pretty fucking cool to be a doctor. I could be one of those dickheads who insists that people call him "doctor" like some of the assholes around work.
And I am working on a usb Linux kernel driver for 2.6. So much has changed since 2.4 development I am only going to support 2.6. Got a problem with that?

I am helping a consultant debug a program he grabbed off of the internet. It is released under the GPL and seems to be really great. So I open up the code and notice... hmm... all of the copyright information has been removed frm the application. He is putting it back in, but it is a crappy thing to do. The guy knew better and I don't understand why you would remove copyright information - aside from being unethical, he is a consultant and not being paid to develop an original piece of code. He is being paid to do a job.

Sheesh, someone does all the work for you - the least you could do is give that person some credit.

Developing software on HP-UX is akin to entering a timewarp and going back about 5 years. While everything is stable (which is great) much of the documentation and support seems to be from 1999/2000. It is like people were really passionate about getting as much information out about HP-UX during a short timeframe and just went away...

I spent the last week trying to get PHP and Apache to compile on HP-UX with all sorts of modules enabled that I need. I think that I will have a few patches to submit to get things like Sybase drivers (freetds), and PHP 5b1 to cleanly compile without errors.

I have been spreading myself really thin lately, and I have neglected some OSS projects I was contributing to. I feel really bad about this, and - once I get a few more PHP and C/C++ programs running nicely on HP-UX for work - I plan on getting back to OSS development. I also want to go back and try to get GNOME to run on HP-UX.

You know you spend too much time working...
...when a vim package for HP-UX 11 makes you excited. Then again, I have been having to struggle with HP's own vi for the last few months because I couldn't get vim to compile with gcc. vim is great, vi is fucking evil.

It is Friday - lighten up!!! Picked up the new Tomahawk (Mike Patton's project) and it is great. Great. Makes me want to join a band and play music again. So much insane energy.

XD2

Ximian GNOME is great. Those guys did a fantastic job at polishing an already very good GNOME. I also switched from Gentoo to Red Hat while I miss being able to customize everything having something that works without too much effort is nice also.

Daughter

It is my daughter's bithday this weekend. Turning 4. What a great 4 years it has been. I think that the parents out there will understand this, but, my life pretty much started when I had a child - it was as though I woke up. Everything in life seemed more real, more lucid. Like my daughter, I have grown quite a bit in four years. Anyways (this is a tech site, so I will leave the personal stuff to a minimum), she made me a really cool gift for father's day and I am just happy as can be. Have a great weekend.